Mary Carty

The School Library Journal, wrote an interesting article on British Education Secretary Michael Gove’s measure to promote literacy in the U.K.  Grove recommends that children, as young as 11, should read 50 books a year.

Wanting to improve literacy levels is a really worthy and necessary initiative but the message is pretty confusing, since the government has decided to close 500 libraries across the UK as well as some school libraries.

UK Children’s authors have spoken out rather than promote Grove’s “50-book challenge” and so they should. Among them, U.K. children’s laureate Anthony Browne said, “It’s always good to hear that the importance of children’s reading is recognized, but rather than setting an arbitrary number of books that children ought to read, I feel it’s the quality of children’s reading experiences that really matter.”

All of this leaves one burning question, where will these children get access to 50 books?

See the full article here.

Image: (cc) by Mike Haufe